Greater Manchester Resilience Strategy 2020-2030
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Greater Manchester Resilience Strategy 2020 - 2030 April 2021 Greater Manchester Resilience Forum Foreword Since setting out to develop this Strategy, Greater Manchester has faced a deadly terrorist attack, major flooding, moorland fires on an unprecedented scale, the effects of COVID-19 and a range of other emergencies. During this period we have also planned for the UK’s exit from the EU and declared a Greater Manchester climate change emergency. It is clear that resilience is, and needs to be, a major priority for the city-region, an area that is home to over 2.8 million people. Just as people, businesses and our cultural heritage tend to be concentrated in our town and cities, risks and opportunities are focused here too. In this context, urban resilience, and the capacity for the places in which we live and work to survive and, if possible, thrive through disruption and crises, becomes fundamental to our collective success. We live in a world where uncertainty is a fact of life. But this doesn’t mean that our ability to create the future that we want should be limited. It doesn’t mean that we’ll wait for emergencies to happen before we act. Greater Manchester has set out its plans for integrating health and social care services, boosting the economy, increasing the availability of affordable housing, reducing crime, enhancing community cohesion, and creating a better environment in which to live, work and visit. But, in making these plans, we must consider the complex challenges we face and establish a pathway to maximise opportunities to build our resilience to the shocks and stresses that could affect us. Shocks such as the Boxing Day Floods in 2015 and, today, Covid-19 illustrate how impacts can be experienced unevenly across society, often hitting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged the hardest. Urban resilience is about our capacity to deal with shocks or disruptive events such as severe weather or infrastructure failures that threaten to knock us off the path we have set for the future. But it is also dependent upon recognising and addressing chronic stresses such as poverty and social inequality that weaken the fabric of society and can undermine attempts to respond to crises and to create a stronger future in their aftermath. 1 Resilience must be about building the future in inclusive and integrated ways. This Strategy sets out a pathway towards that more resilient future. It recognises existing work that is vital to our resilience but also challenges us all to consider how our contribution to resilience could be enhanced. As Chair of the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum that will lead this work, I invite you to join us on our journey towards greater resilience so that, together, we can make Greater Manchester one of the most resilient places in the world to grow up, get on and grow old together. Nick Baily, Assistant Chief Constable, Greater Manchester Police, Chair of the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum 2 Introduction This Resilience Strategy is the first of its kind for Greater Manchester. It builds on nearly two decades of multi-agency working to plan and to respond to civil risks and emergencies within the context of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. It incorporates learning from efforts in Greater Manchester and across the world to reduce the risk of disasters and crises. It has been created using the processes and tools developed by 100 Resilient Cities (now the Resilient Cities Network) which aim to catalyse the strengthening of urban resilience in our cities and city-regions. Emergencies have intensely personal and local impacts however the causes often reflect global trends. This is particularly evident in the case of climate change and its projected consequences for the city-region. However, the ways in which we are affected by emergencies and longer-term shocks, are compounded by pre-existing challenges in our society which often come to the fore in a crisis, whether a lack of community cohesion, insufficient funding for essential services, or degradation of the natural environment with a loss of biodiversity. This cycle can be mitigated by our approach to urban resilience and by baking resilience considerations into every investment decision we make. The development of this Strategy has been steered by the multi-agency partnership that coordinates civil resilience in the city-region: the Greater Manchester Resilience Forum. Currently chaired by Greater Manchester Police, this Forum brings together over 80 agencies to assess civil risks, to mitigate these risks where possible, to plan to respond should an emergency occur and to support communities in the aftermath. The first phase of developing this Strategy started in 2016 with an ‘Agenda Setting Workshop’, a scoping exercise involving a broad range of local stakeholders. Workshop sessions explored the shocks and stresses facing Greater Manchester and the priorities for strengthening our future resilience. This was followed by further workshops, consultation exercises, knowledge exchanges with other cities, delivering resilience-building projects and continuing to learn from emergencies. The resulting Preliminary Resilience Assessment, published in 2018, offered a resilience baseline for Greater Manchester and identified five ‘Discovery Areas’ (resilience challenges and opportunities) on which to concentrate. 3 Phase two, the drafting of this Strategy, was founded on experiences of implementing work in these five Discovery Areas. This was in addition to further consultation, engagement with a widening number of stakeholders and commissioning of specific research. It also drew on learning from recent shock events, such as the Manchester Arena attack in 2017, the moorland wildfires in 2018, rainfall damage to Toddbrook Reservoir in 2019 and, most recently, the Covid- 19 pandemic. This Strategy sets out our vision for a resilient Greater Manchester. In this changing and complex world, our vision is to create one of the most resilient places where everyone can grow up, get on and age well together. It describes five priority areas to guide our work through to 2030 and sets out key themes within these priorities. The Strategy will be accompanied by an action plan, reviewed regularly to ensure we stay on track. The Strategy runs to 2030 since this is the date by which countries across the world, including our own, have committed to making a real difference to reducing the occurrence of disasters. This commitment is captured in the UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 which, as one of its 7 targets, sets out to substantially increase the number of local disaster risk reduction strategies. Greater Manchester joins a growing number of cities that have taken up the challenge to deliver on this commitment. We are grateful to all the many individuals, communities and organisations who have helped to shape this Strategy and we look forward to harnessing their enthusiasm as we get to work on its delivery. Together we can create a more resilient future. Dr Kathy Oldham OBE, Chief Resilience Officer, Greater Manchester Combined Authority 4 Greater Manchester Facts The 10 districts of Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan are home to over 2.8 million people and together they form the Greater Manchester city-region. With a Gross Value Added of £65.6 billion (Office for National Statistics, 2017), Greater Manchester represents the largest functional economic area outside of London. Greater Manchester has a proud history of innovation that includes the world’s first passenger railway, the first stored-program electronic computer and, in our own time, the Nobel Prize-winning isolation of graphene. We have also driven social progress. The Chartists, the Trade Union movement, the Co-Operative movement, and women’s suffrage were all born in the city-region. England’s first civic university, the University of Manchester, was established here and the area is now home to five universities, all with a leading role in education, research and discoveries that have global importance. Greater Manchester has seen major change over past decades and this is projected to continue. Our population and employment patterns are expected to evolve which, along with considerable environmental (including climate change) and technological changes, have the potential to bring opportunities but also to impact significantly upon our resilience. Our communities face many ongoing challenges. For example, many people experience serious poor health and deep-rooted inequalities. People who live in Greater Manchester are likely, on average, to have a shorter life expectancy and a lower healthy life expectancy (years of life with good general health) than the average for England, with some areas experiencing a healthy life expectancy of below 50 years of age. And over 1 million of our residents live in areas amongst the 20% most deprived in England (University College London Institute for Health Equity, 2020). These drivers of vulnerability, if left unchecked, will mean that any shock events or emergencies will have greater consequences for our residents. This Strategy sets out how we would like to make Greater Manchester more resilient: better able to respond to risks that do occur, to reduce where possible the risks we face, and to avoid where we can the creation of any new risks. But it also recognises 5 that resilience needs to be embedded in everything we do. That is why this Strategy supports and is supported